"Survivor" goes to class

I haven't watched the TV show "Survivor" since that fantastic first season (Rudy Boesch -- that's the Rudy I want to see run for president). This morning in an editorial board meeting, one of my colleagues who is a devotee of the show mentioned how interesting the current season is. He said that the show has divided the two teams in terms of class. One team is the "haves" -- they've been given a good place to stay, lots of supplies, and so on -- and the other team is the "have-nots," who basically were given a bucket and told to lump it.

"The interesting thing is that unlike the race-based 'Survivor' season, where race didn't affect the results of the competition, the Haves have won practically every competition," my colleague said. "The Have-Nots are really struggling."

I haven't seen the show, so take this for what it's worth, but it seems reasonable to conclude that the stress of having to do without, and having to struggle hard for what little one can scrape together, does take a lot out of one, and make one less fit for competition against those who don't have to waste time and energy on subsistence. Right?

Here's an entry from a blogger who's watching Survivor, and thinking the same thoughts:

So, as I’ve watched these first two weeks, I’ve watched something somewhat familiar unfold. The wealthy tribe is happy, goofy, and having a high old time (the producers provide us with happy music to underscore the point as well). This tribe wins the competitions--in part because they’re eating and drinking regularly--and they seem to get along with one and other well. Life is good, and they seem to think they deserve this life because they’re winning. They’re not questioning the unfair structure of the game itself, the randomness of why they were put into one tribe and not the other. They don’t seem to have a good grasp on the fact that their wealth allows them happiness and allows them an advantage over the others. Things just are. And things are good.

The “poor” tribe, on the other hand, is predictably miserable. They bicker; they blame one another for their losses; they’re dehydrated, hungry and miserable. Remarkably, however, (or maybe note), not once do they blame the structures which have put them in such an unfair situation. While one of them briefly mentions the difficulty of physical and mental challenges when one is starving (i.e., what they have to do to compete with the other tribe for more spoils), for the most part, they simply blame one of their own members for losing, for whining, for complaining. Life sucks, and it’s someone in their own tribe who is at fault.

And so, as I was watching last night, I wondered what I would do on that island, and I wondered how well this parallels the cycles of poverty and wealth in our own world. Clearly, some people would say that the parallels to our own world are obvious. Wealthy people do have better health, better information and better knowledge (not to mention better connections). I wonder, however, how often they think these are deserved conditions. I wonder how often they realize the advantage this gives them. To quote, Jim Hightower, evidently, how many of them are born on third but think they hit a triple?

And of our poor? How many understand the structural forces that have worked against them? How many of them think the system is fair? How many blame themselves for all of their own ills, without thinking about the system which supports such inequality?

Let me be clear: I’m not raising these questions from a far left perspective; I’m no socialist. I raise these questions because, regardless of what economic structures we choose, we need to recognize both personal responsibility and structural responsibility.

Oh no! Class warfare! Must not discuss! Bad! Bad!

On a similar note, the liberal Harold Meyerson makes a pretty good point in his column today, in which he comments on a sobering WaPo piece showing how marriage has become an institution favored by the educated middle class, while the working class is passing it by (though still having kids):

Over the past 35 years, the massive changes in the U.S. economy have largely condemned American workers to lives of economic insecurity. No longer can the worker count on a steady job for a single employer who provides a paycheck and health and retirement benefits, too. Over the past three decades, workers' individual annual income fluctuations have consistently increased, while their aggregate income has stagnated. In the brave new economy of outsourced jobs and short-term gigs and on-again, off-again health coverage, American workers cannot rationally plan their economic futures. And with each passing year, as their level of economic security declines, so does their entry into marriage.

Yet the very conservatives who marvel at the efficiency of our new, more mobile economy and extol the "flexibility" of our workforce decry the flexibility of the personal lives of American workers. The right-wing ideologues who have championed outsourcing, offshoring and union-busting, who have celebrated the same changes that have condemned American workers to lives of financial instability, piously lament the decline of family stability that has followed these economic changes as the night the day.

American conservatism is a house divided against itself. It applauds the radicalism of the economic changes of the past four decades -- the dismantling, say, of the American steel industry (and the job and income security that it once provided) in the cause of greater efficiency. It decries the decline of social and familial stability over that time -- the traditional, married working-class families, say, that once filled all those churches in the hills and hollows in what is now the smaller, post-working-class Pittsburgh.

Problem is, disperse a vibrant working-class community in America and you disperse the vibrant working-class family.

Which is how American conservatism became the primary author of the very social disorder that it routinely rails against, and that Republicans have the gall to run against.

Is this a chicken-or-egg thing? Getting married and staying married is a good predictor of whether or not you'll rise economically. But to what extent is economic instability a predictor of whether or not you'll get married? An American friend living in Italy -- a devout and conservative Catholic -- explained to me that the lower rate of marriage and childbearing among Italians of our generation is not simply a matter of selfish Europeans and a loss of religious faith, but is also because it is incredibly expensive to do so there.

The Meyersons of the world don't want to talk about how their views on sexual liberation contribute to the continued poverty of many people. But the anti-Meyersons of the world don't want to talk about how their views on economic freedom contribute to social and moral breakdown. I guess when Wendell Berry runs for president, we'll finally have a candidate who puts a pox on both houses.